The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers (for example, mobile operators) are developing improvements to existing networks. In this regard, for example, improvements are being made to the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN). Further, for example, the evolved-UTRAN (E-UTRAN) is currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards.
Mobile operators and carriers are constantly adjusting to the growth of data traffic in their networks, communication device use and in particular smartphone use with various always-on applications and proliferation of high definition video are examples of aspects that have significantly impacted the amount of data in mobile operators' networks. At the same time, however, the average revenue earned by the networks on a per user basis is not following the average increase of traffic on a per user basis. This trend is creating affordability issues for the mobile operators; such as how to cover investments in capacity in the future.
In response to the aforementioned affordability issues, mobile operators may, for example, develop strategies for dealing with the data growth. Those strategies include, but are not limited to Wi-Fi offloading, deployment of smaller cells, different data packages that are better tailored for subscribers' needs, etc. As part of the offloading aspect of the strategy, operators may also consider offloading, such as offloading that 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined as Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF). ANDSF is configured to, for example, allow a mobile terminal operator to push down to the devices the policies guiding the device behavior with respect to how to use Wi-Fi access for offloading; what kind of services may be offloaded and to where and/or the like.
In some examples, besides using Wi-Fi offloading as the means for a mobile operator to reduce the pressure on their own cellular access, there are also available vendor specific solutions for preserving over-the-air bandwidth. These solutions are commonly described as application proxies. The example application proxy approach is either application specific or device operating system specific solution for reducing the effects of application keep-alive messages or for reducing the capacity taken by web browsing, for example, by compressing the traffic over the radio.